The prevalence of modern digital cameras enables users to capture a large number of digital photographs and store them on the camera before they are eventually saved or printed. This is partly due to advancements in compact flash-based digital storage, which have made large digital camera storage accessible to retail consumers.
The ability to capture and store a large quantity of unclassified images which tends to accumulate in a user's digital photograph collection, however, poses difficulties for users in selecting images for printing or other purposes. For example, manually searching through an unclassified collection of photographs to select particular photographs for printing or further processing can be tedious and/or time consuming. This problem is further exacerbated when groups of the photographs are substantially similar.
The problem of image selection from a large collection of unclassified photographs is particularly apparent in a photo kiosk system. The limited available input devices (e.g., touch screen only), as well as a lack of permanent storage in kiosk systems, make the searching and selection of desired images from a large collection of unclassified digital photographs more difficult. Manually searching through the collection of photographs is made more time consuming as a result of constraints relating to user interaction with the system. Furthermore, the lack of permanent storage generally prevents permanent records, such as indexed databases, to be generated and/or maintained in order to aid the search process. A situation where this problem becomes apparent occurs, for example, when a user takes a large number of digital photographs to a photo kiosk over a prolonged period of time and then wishes to create photographic merchandise. The user would typically search for photographs containing certain persons of interest, such as friends or family members. This would be a very time consuming process as manual searching of the photograph collection would take a long time and would be exacerbated by the limited modes of user input to the photo kiosk system. This has a negative impact as the kiosk provider (retailer) has an interest in reducing the amount of time each user spends at the kiosk creating an order, thus increasing the number of users that can use the kiosk in a given period of time to increase turnover. Users may also be discouraged from using a photo kiosk if the process of creating an order is inconveniently long.
Several attempts have been made to overcome this problem. A method disclosed in U.S. Patent Publication No. 20070177805, filed on 27 Jan. 2008 and assigned to Eastman Kodak, enables a user to select persons of interest from a large collection of photographs. The system then performs a person detection algorithm on each photograph in the large collection of photographs in order to identify all photographs that include an instance of the selected person. This method disadvantageously requires the user to perform an extensive manual search of the large unclassified image collection in order to select persons of interest. The process is thus still very time consuming and generally only provides a marginal improvement when compared to a completely manual searching technique.
Another method disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,286,723, filed on 23 Oct. 2007 and assigned to Hewlett Packard, relates to an automated searching algorithm which searches a large collection of unclassified photographs by first analysing each image in the collection of photographs and identifying faces and/or particular scenes in the photographs. The algorithm then compares the detected faces and/or scenes to an indexed database of images containing annotated faces and/or images, in order to extract images containing instances of faces contained in the indexed database. This method is disadvantageous in that its implementation requires a persistent indexed database of facial images, which is generally not possible in a kiosk environment.
A need thus exists for improved methods and systems that substantially overcome or at least ameliorate disadvantages associated with existing arrangements.